Modeling a Paperclip in Maya

hello everybody one of the best ways to become a better 3d modeler is to periodically give yourself small modeling challenges and that's exactly what we're going to do today so what i'm going to model is a paper clip and it's not particularly difficult it's not a particularly difficult form yet it does require some problem solving we have to figure out how we're going to tackle this challenge here now one thing i really recommend doing even when you're modeling the most common objects around you is to do some visual research so in the case of this paper clip i did a google image search to actually look at paper clips so that i could better understand their form i would do this even if i were modeling a fork or a spoon or something simple like that that i use every day because even the most common thing sometimes we miss the details unless we do that visual research so here's my visual research i'm looking at this paper clip here and getting to understand its form let's go ahead and jump into maya and try to model it now before i begin uh i would recommend actually pausing the video at this point and attempting to model the 3d paper clip yourself in other words coming up with your own solutions and then resume watching the video a little bit later and i'll show you a couple of my solutions so let's go ahead and take a look at my solution number one first thing i'm going to do is take a look at that image one more time of this paper clip here and there's a couple forms on it that repeat i look at you know some of these uh straight areas here on the paper clip and then we also have these rounded areas we've got three of these rounded areas on the paper clip and i'm going to start with that in creating my paper clip so i'm going to return to maya and we'll start modeling now and to begin with i am going to create a taurus now when you first create your taurus what you can do is go to the channel box or you could also do this in the attribute editor you can do that here in the attribute editor as well but i'm going to go to my channel box to the inputs the drop down here and some of the things that we can do that are going to be very helpful rather than just scaling the entire torus we can actually adjust its radius we can of course adjust its subdivision axes and its height segments so i think i'll bring the height segments down just enough so that we can get a nice rounded form perhaps i could go with eight maybe that's enough eight sections around and i'll go ahead and keep the subdivision axis on 20. i think that'll be a good number to get this nice rounded form here but then the other thing i want to do is change the radius of this you can see that the benefit of that as opposed to actually scaling it is that the radius of arturus grows but the section radius this section here remains the same we can we can make the radius bigger or smaller and keep that same radius here okay so let's find a good number for this [Music] i think i'll go with a radius of perhaps 3.5 so this will be the beginning of our paper clip now if i duplicate this torus one thing to take note of is that i cannot change its inputs unless i do a duplicate special and then i can but we're going to work with just simple duplicates so that's important when you duplicate you don't get the option so i can't come in here and easily make those adjustments but i can still make the adjustments to the original one so that's what i'm going to do let me put this one back in the center and we'll grab our original taurus now with my original taurus selected i'll come in here and i'll change its radius once again maybe make it four so it's a little bit bigger in fact we'll just move these off of one another so you can see them a little bit better once again i'm going to keep that original but i'm going to duplicate go back to the original and let's make that one a radius of perhaps three so if we just put all these on top of one another we get this but what we can do is move them off of one another now we actually don't need the full taurus so i'm going to go into component mode and let me go to the top view where i can select this a little bit more easily delete the faces on some of these and now we'll start lining these up to create our paper clip so i'm going to temporarily move this one over here we know that this part here of this larger semicircle is going to need to join with this one here so let's just line them up that should be good i'll go ahead and move this down and we'll do the same with this one as well we'll line it up and maybe move it up like that the next thing we'll do is we'll select all three of these parts and combine them so i'll go to my modeling toolkit and click on combine so it becomes one single mesh now i'll select these edges on this semi-circle here and these edges on this other one and bridge them do the same with this one and this one and then i'll select these edges and these edges here and do an extrude and in fact if we want them to be the same at the same let's say um distance here we can just bring this one down and as you can see our paper clip is looking pretty good at this point now we have these caps that are open right now so let's go ahead and select these edges here and i will go to edit mesh fill hole or sorry to mesh fill hole we'll fill that one and we'll do the same for this one we'll select those edges go to mesh fill hole i'm going to select these edges here and i'll select them here as well and we'll put a bevel on it maybe increase the segments and reduce the fraction of it so that we get something like that now this next step isn't entirely necessary but i'm going to do it anyway you'll notice that this face is composed of multiple edges and what i'm going to do is divide it into quads so i'm going to use my multi-cut tool to do that and i'll do the same here and more or less we now have our paper clip now we might want to do a couple more things to it right now we have these hard edges on it we can easily just select the model go to mesh display and soften those edges and that will make it look nicer and if we needed to add resolution to it because maybe we don't want to have maybe this isn't rounded enough here of course we could always come in here later and apply a mesh smooth to it i'm going to undo that however so that's my first solution for modeling a paperclip i hope the takeaway from all of this for you is that really we can create these complicated forms using the the very basic tools that you already know and that we can create it using polygon primitives as a starting point let's go ahead and now take a look at a second solution for creating a paper clip so now let's take a look at solution number two and for this one i'm going to approach the problem a little bit differently i'm going to use cv curves so to create a cv curve you go to create curve tools cv curve tool i do want to make sure that it is set to 3 cubic because that's what's going to give me nice smooth curves and i think i'll turn on snap to grid for this so that i can get everything lined up nicely now just click in place using the grid actually to help me create this and that should give us a reasonable curve for for creating this this paper clip take a look at it here it is what i'm going to do now is create a another cv curve but this time i'll do it by going to create nurbs primitives circle and conveniently it actually went right to the right place went right to the end of this cv curve tool because i started at the origin but even if i hadn't that wouldn't be a big deal actually it'd be very easy because i have snapped a grid on right now but even without snapped grid on if i turn off snap to grid what i can do is turn on snap to curve and then if i bring it very close to the curve release and then grab it again you'll see i can snap it to anywhere on the curve now anywhere on the curve i'm going to bring it right to the very end of the curve there turn off snap to curve rewind sorry rotate this 90 degrees maybe scale it in a little and now with this curve selected and then my second curve selected and to tell you the truth i might get the order wrong i sometimes mess that up i'm going to go to surfaces i'm in my just so you know i'm in my modeling tools here i'm going to go to surfaces and we're going to extrude it along this curve and here's what we get now there are a couple settings in here that might help make this look a little better because you can see there's some problematic areas like there and there but with the surface selected if we come over here to extrude type instead of flat we can set it to tube the convenient thing about this is that we currently have history on this so if i select that nurbs circle there you can see that i can actually still make adjustments to it here's what it looks like right now in fact i should point out also not only can we uh with the history adjust the circle here we can even come in and adjust the original paper paper clip curve as well go into its components and we can still adjust them as well actually i have the components for the actual surface selected now so let me let me change that i'm going to select my curve and press f8 so what you'll see here is that we can actually still come in here and further refine the shape of our paper clip now there are a couple things however about the paper clip that we should take note of first of all that its normals are reversed right now that's why it's black so if we go to with the object selected we go to surfaces and we find reverse direction we can flip that the other thing to take note of is that this is actually currently a nurbs object it's not a polygon object so it behaves very differently than a polygon object but we can easily convert it into polygons so here's how we would do that with the model selected i'm going to go to modify convert and we're going to go to nurbs to polygons and i'm going to open up this tool settings box now i'm going to reset this just so i can show you what the default settings are and then i'll show you my preferred my preferred settings so instead of doing [Music] the default settings which will give us this what i'm going to do is select my model and i'm going to check control points now watch what this does i'll apply it and we get this which doesn't look very great but what we can do is take that model come over here to our modeling toolkit and do a smooth on it and we'll get this and like the other example we can come in here and we can cap it off by filling those holes and putting a bevel on it and all of that i guess the one thing i would say about the way i've worked with this right now is that it's a bit dense i think in particular with the number of edges we have coming around it like that that's probably a little denser than what i'd like but we could change that with some cleanup or with some of the conversion process of taking it from a nurbs mesh to a polygon mesh um one other thing about this particular solution that i don't really like is you can see here even though we set it to tube uh it just seems to unnaturally get a little narrow right here around that bend it does the same here as well so i'm going to show you a third solution that is kind of a combination of the first and the second solution so let's go ahead and take a look at that now okay so now we'll take a look at solution number three let's get started so similar to the first example i'm going to start with not tauruses but circles so i'll go to create nurbs primitive circle and we can come in here and we can change uh some of its parameters we'll make it maybe a little bigger this could be very similar to the um well as i said before it's actually going to be kind of a combination of the first solution in the second solution so now that i have my first circle i think i'll duplicate it select my original circle go into its inputs go ahead and bring its radius in some go ahead and duplicate that select the original one again and now we have our three circles i'm going to select my first circle and i'm going to select the edit points on it and i'm going to select these two edit points right here go to curves and detach we now have two half circles go ahead and get rid of that one we'll do the same to this one now select its edit points curves detach and we'll select our last one select those edit points curves detach and now we'll start arranging them so let's see i need this curve here to join with this one here like that so it doesn't have to be perfect although we could get it perfect by using our snap to curve tool and moving the pivot point for this but i'm not going to do that i'm going to go ahead and just kind of eyeball it and line them up as well as i can something like that go ahead and bring this down and i'll select this one as well it actually joins with that quite nicely already so that should be good now what we're going to do is create the rest of the paper clip curves that we need here i'm going to go to create curve tools this time i think i'll use the ep curve tool i'm going to turn on snap to curve because that will allow me to easily draw curves from i'm using the left mouse drag right now and dragging on that first curve to the end of it for my first point coming over here to this second curve dragging on it to its end point enter got a nice line now a nice nurbs curve that's going to join these two sections here do that again and i think i'll turn off the snap to curve now we'll draw another curve though actually actually let me let me take that back i am going to keep snapped a curve on temporarily and oh that should be good and we'll draw one more currently i'm holding down shift just so you know shift keeps it on this oh keeps it lined up with with this point here the first point that i drew and we'll press enter oops okay i didn't mean to add that other point but that's okay we'll go ahead and just get rid of it there actually i didn't do the best job with this because we actually want this part further down don't we well we can go ahead and adjust that just bring that down select its edit point and move it over here try to snap it to that curve there we go a little tricky do there we go that'll be better so now that we have these curves i'll select them and we might run into a little problem here we'll see but i'm going to select all of them and what i'm going to do actually i don't know if this is going to work let's see i'm going to go to curves and i'm going to attach let's just see if that worked actually it looks like it did look at that we've got now we still have all the original curves but now we also have this uh single curve that's going to work very nicely for creating our paper clip one thing to keep note of though is that you can see that it still has history on it so if we don't want that history what we can do is we can select this curve go to edit delete by type history now if we make adjustments to these other curves here these original curves it won't affect this one here in fact i'm going to go ahead and just delete those i don't really need them anymore so we'll just delete them so if you remember with the second solution what we did was we created another nurbs curve a circle and then we extruded it along the length of our paper clip form this time we're going to do something a little bit different actually a solution that i prefer to that second solution so let's take a look at how we're going to accomplish this so with my nurbs curve selected what i'm going to do is come over here to generate curve utilities and i'm going to attach a brush to the curve and here's what i get now this is interesting because this itself is not a polygon object and it's not a nurbs surface either it is a paint effect but we can do some interesting things with it so let's check it out i'm going to go to the attribute editor while i have it still selected and what i'm going to do is go to the default brush tab uh to the brush profile and i'm going to change its brush width because i think this is a little too thin so we'll just increase that you see we can increase decrease it and i think that should be pretty good if you need more resolution on it you can also go to this other tab and you'll notice that we've got a sample density i can bring that down if i want it to be lower resolution i can bring it up if i want higher resolution i think i'm going to leave it like that now the other thing to keep in mind as i mentioned is that this is actually not a nurbs surface and it's not a polygon object either if i were to right click on this you see i just do not get those uh selections of vertices edges faces and so on but very similar to the nurbs surface that we created earlier i can convert this to a polygon object as well and that's what i'm going to do so i have my paint effect selected and what i'm going to do is go to modify convert remember that this is a paint effect so paint effects to polygons i'm going to reset this so i can show you my preferred setting if i apply this now you'll see i get a bunch of triangles i'm going to undo that i prefer to select quad output and then apply this is now a polygon object you can see that i can also select the faces the edges and so on and work with it as any other polygon mesh now a couple things i would probably do would be creating new material for it and i think like the first example and the second example we're going to want to cap the ends by selecting those faces there sorry the edges and then coming over to mesh fill hole we can go ahead and do that bevel on it as well maybe add a segment to it change the fraction and while i'm at it maybe i'll go ahead and use my multi-cut tool to make that cap two quads oops don't know what i did there but there it is and here is my paper clip so we looked at three different solutions for creating a paper clip the first solution i'm sure was all tools that you are already familiar with and to tell you the truth of the three solutions my preference is the first solution the simplest solution where we started with just some simple polygon toruses simple solution but an effective one anyway again i think that these small modeling challenges can be very very useful uh for building up your modeling skills you can get them done quickly and yet they still require some creative and technical problem solving so i hope that you have enjoyed this video and thank you for watching

Channel: Vad Almafa

Views: 167

Keywords: autodesk, maya, paperclip, cmt 123

Id: FCy1OnHwL1A

Length: 34min 17sec (2057 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021